While the industry applauds a new era of female empowerment, a controversial actor is poised to win an Oscar and men dominated music’s big night

Casey Affleck, under fire for sexual harassment allegations, has withdrawn as an Oscars presenter. James Franco, accused of sexual misconduct by five women, was snubbed from the nominations.

Little of the #MeToo pressure, however, has landed on Gary Oldman, a nominee who was once accused of abusing an ex-wife and who previously used racist and sexist slurs in an interview while railing against “political correctness” and defending Mel Gibson’s antisemitic comments. On the contrary, Oldman is expected to win the top prize, his first best actor trophy, which critics say is something of a lifetime achievement award.

The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro’s fantasy epic about a woman who falls in love with a sea monster, leads the nominations for this year’s Bafta film awards – though it will face strong competition from Martin McDonagh’s Golden Globe-winning black comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and the Gary Oldman-starring Churchill biopic Darkest Hour.

At a Bafta press conference that also unveiled Joanna Lumley as the new host for the awards, Del Toro’s drama picked up 12 nominations, including best film and best director, as well as a best actress pick for Sally Hawkins and best supporting actress for Octavia Spencer.

Darkest Hour portrays the wartime prime minister as a flawed leader. But we shouldn’t forget how he worked with Labour to defeat the pro-fascist sympathies of large sections of the British elite

‘For days past there has been no real news and little possibility of inferring what is really happening,” wrote George Orwell in his diary, on 28 May 1940. “Last night, E[ileen] and I went to the pub to hear the 9 o’c news. The barmaid was not going to have it on if we had not asked her, and to all appearances nobody listened.”

That was the second day of the Dunkirk evacuation, and just hours after Churchill had made his speech to the Cabinet, which said: “If this long island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground”.

The dazzling British actor, often mentioned in the same breath as Daniel Day-Lewis, is tipped for a Golden Globe for his role as a national saviour, a long journey from playing punks and skinheads

The 1980s was a dazzling era for young, explosive British actors and two of the brightest fireworks in the box were Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis. They followed parallel trajectories: a 1960s childhood in south-east London, acclaimed stage work in the 1970s and on in the next decade to screen performances that gave homegrown cinema its equivalents to Method heavyweights such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, as well as successors to angry young men such as Albert Finney and Malcolm McDowell. (McDowell’s confrontational performance in The Raging Moon inspired Oldman to become an actor.)

They will compete next month in a Brit-off at the Golden Globes for the best actor prize, with the rivalry likely to continue at the Oscars in March. Day-Lewis, 60, has been nominated for his absorbing portrayal of a controlling, fastidious dressmaker in Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant Phantom Thread, in which he stars with Lesley Manville, Oldman’s first of five wives to date. (They were married from 1987 to 1990.)